Usenet IPA/ASCII transcription

In August of 1992, some of the readers of the Usenet newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english got fed up with
common in which posters tried to describe how words were pronounced
(by them or in dialects under discussion) by reference to how
other words were pronounced (by the author). Since
individuals pronounce different words differently, this tended to lead
to (occasionally interesting, but often merely) long, fruitless
threads.

There already was a scheme occasionally used for noting
transcription, but it suffered from (among other things) the fact that
it was highly skewed toward describing English. This made it less
than useful for the denizens of sci.lang.

Since there already existed a notation (the International Phonetic
Alphabet, or IPA) for precisely specifying phonemic and phonetic
values, several of us decided that it couldn't be too hard to put
together a reasonable transcription scheme of IPA into 7-bit ASCII
characters. We naturally had to allow some of the IPA symbols to map
onto multiple characters (since there are more IPA symbols than ASCII
characters), but we finally settled on a scheme in which each segment
is represented by a single character, potentially followed by some
number of "diacritics", which can either be single characters or
delimited tokens. [We also came up with a very narrow feature-based
representation for use when precision is needed or when no symbol
completely fits the bill.] Unlike some other such attempts, we took
it as a given that this transcription had to be directly readable, so
each character needed to be at least somewhat evocative of its IPA
value.

It is expected that when the Unicode/ISO 10646 character
set becomes commonly used for mail, news, and web pages, this
transcription will no longer be needed, as the IPA characters will be
able to be used directly.

Included in this archive are the specification
itself and the "Pronunciation Symbols"
page of Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary",
done over in this transcription. This latter should be of use for
American English speakers who are not used to the IPA symbols.

In the future I hope to add a version of the specification which
includes images of the actual IPA characters as well as sound clips of
each of the segments.